Blog Posts Tagged with "vendors"

Listening to bad brand statements is like sitting through a bad movie or comedy skit. Yes, I am among those who stand politely as a vendor tries to sell me something without bothering to determine what I actually care about. At least I get to learn about bad brand stories...

A company responsible for handling billing and settlement for the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has been selling flight booking information about corporate travelers — on a travel agency level — to airlines, hotels and others...

CIMI is arguably more complex than a simple standard – it reflects that people want to rubber stamp a standard, but also want to deliver proprietary functionality as a point of differentiation from the competition. CIMI is a positive initiative, but the proof is in the pudding...

Assuming you have selected a service to migrate to a cloud provider, and have selected the cloud provider, even after contract signing, things may still be far from complete. The migration process is the thing that can be very painful and can break the entire service for an extended amount of time...

As social media becomes part of the continuum of interaction in the physical and virtual worlds, privacy becomes an issue of discretionary disclosure control. Online privacy and patient privacy will evolve into a market for products and services with stratified pricing, packaging and product positioning...

Cloud vendors are quick to point out how reliable their data centers are with redundant channels, power supply structures and the like. Any application running on the cloud needs to consider the same issues – it is unrealistic to rely on one single data center – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link...

As the complexity of attacks grow at a rate outstripping the pace of Moores Law, defenders have to take up a more nuanced approach to protecting their environments. Reliance on technical solutions alone is not tenable, you have to look at the creature behind the keyboard to get a better picture of the attack...

The Information Security industry is rife with negativity. Why are we so quick to pile on to others' pain? Isn the security community just more cynical by nature, is it psychological? Are we wired this way? As an industry, our goal is to create more resilient, more secure' and more defensible postures for everyone...

Words like engagement and community are overused by charlatans, marketing gurus, and social media experts- but if you cut the crap and actually engage the community, people will pay attention. Influencer is another abused term, but some people have more of a voice in the community than others. Ignoring people who aren’t ready to buy could be a very bad idea...

At the end of the day, if is slightly cheaper to own your hardware than to rent, the fact is that if in doing so you have to spend time focusing on technology instead of focusing on your core business, then that savings pales into insignificance when compared to the real value that pure focus can bring...

What makes an organization effective is in knowing what their customer-base needs or wants. We are only as valuable as the service we give to our customers. For many of us, our primary customers are internal. The business leaders, the IT department, our vendors, and many others are the customers who are served...

Rather than brute-forcing the account, the hackers gained access by doing some creative social engineering by contacting Apple customer support. The problem is that we often turn over our data to 3rd-party providers without understanding what protocols they have in place to keep our data safe...

Many companies will omit many details and shift-slash-skew agendas to meet their concerns. Those concerns will ALWAYS be financial ones. At this point it is obvious that they and only they are capable of detecting the unseen, unheard of, undetectable, uberfilthware capable of infecting curiousity on Mars...

The company dominates its market and any tweaks to operational efficiencies such as pairing down the product catalog, rationalizing SKUs, normalizing points given to distributors, and optimizing sales, R&D, marketing, and the executive office, will lead to greater profitability and stock performance...

The upside for being in Vegas for BlackHat is that BSidesLV runs concurrently. BSides always tend to be much better events. The attendees are rarely the vendor mouthpiece types and this alone makes the conference enjoyable. I had attended more talks at BSides than I have at other conferences combined this year....

Disregard tales of drunken hackers menacing Vegas hotels, changing signs and doing social engineering attacks. They are good for amusement and awareness, but they are NOT really useful as a lens for viewing your organization’s risk or the steps you should be taking to protect your data. Instead, stick to the basics...